... Her Majesty's secret servants Robin Ramsay SIS and Libya H enry Kissinger is widely quoted as having once said that 'America has no friends, only interests'; and when push comes to shove this is true for all states. This island has been called something like 'perfidious Albion' for almost a thousand years.1 Neither proposition has ever been better illustrated than by this country's foreign policy towards Libya in the past 20 years or so. Former MI5 officer David Shayler reported that in 1996 MI6 had paid £100,000 to a Libyan Islamist group for the assassination of Colonel Gadaffi; and, although denied by the British formal foreign policy apparatus, a great deal of evidence, including ...

... threats to halt US support for sterling. Wilson refused for two reasons that I am aware of. The most pressing was that had he sent UK troops to Vietnam there would have been massive problems with the left-wing of the Labour Party in and outside parliament. And in those days this mattered. The second reason was suggested by the former SIS officer Anthony Cavendish, who told me twenty years ago that Maurice Oldfield, when deputy chief of SIS, had warned Wilson not get embroiled in Vietnam. Oldfield had served as an SIS regional head in the Far East in the middle 1950s when the French were driven out of Vietnam and seems to have acquired a more rational appreciation of ...

... Radio days The first full account of the Radio Security Service. Established at the start of World War Two to interceptthe wireless messages of enemy spies, it achieved its greatest success through the work of its Analysis Bureau, headed by Hugh Trevor-Roper. This included the production of reports on Axis intelligence activities and resulted in its eventual independence from the SIS as the Radio Intelligence Service.(14) 'Nation shall speak peace unto Nation'The role of the BBC during the Cold War is examined in detail in a special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.(15) Articles include: James R. Vaughan, 'The BBC's ex- ternal services and the ...

... like Norwood, innocents who never took on board the reality of the Soviet regime. This was quite interesting to me. I grew up among such people and thus acquired some of their instinctive pro-Soviet bias, which took a long time to shed. There is also an interesting account of the political manoeuvrings around Metrokhin and Norwood as MI5 and SIS tried to establish their respective spin on the story. SIS, who wanted a prosecution of Nor-wood (to show MI5 incompetence, I presume), gave the Norwood material to David Rose, the recently self-outed SIS media asset, for a TV programme. MI5, who didn't want to prosecute her, got their version to Philip Knightley ...

... reality intrudes too little. In Dead Men Don't Eat Lunch (self-published) Geoffrey Gilson describes of his attempt to unravel the life of Hugh Simmonds, his business partner (and political rival in the Tory Party). A solicitor, Simmonds died having apparently misappropriated millions from his clients' accounts. He claimed to have been a member of SIS and Gilson, after much stumbling around the interface between Tory Party, SIS and the arms industry, thinks he has found that Simmonds was using clients' funds to run SIS ops in the Middle East. En route, via consultations with several mediums (a first, perhaps in a political investigation?), he meets a cavalcade ...

... in secrets inquiry over nuclear revelations', The Guardian 19 December 2007. He is apparently suspected of passing information on this to David Armstrong and Joseph Trento, the authors of another book on this subject, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise. See also the 2005 account by David Rose yes, that David Rose, ex SIS asset Rose in Vanity Fair at <www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9774.htm> On Rose and SIS see 'View from the Bridge' in Lobster 54. <http://rawstory.com/news/2007/They_sold_out_world_for_F16_0426.h tml> Last| Contents| Next ...

... of yesterday's men from both sides of the Atlantic Carter, Kissinger, Nunn, Brezezinski, Schultz, Howe, Carlucci, David Howell bemoan the mess made by the current administrations in Washington and London. In the 'List of contributors' Sir Mark Allen is described as a 'a retired member of HM Diplomatic Service', the current euphemism for SIS. If you google <MarkAllen+ MI6> you get thousands of hits. So why persist with the euphemism? One day there may be enough material available to work out which of these versions is true. Last| Contents| Next ...

... anyway guaranteed by the colourful production teams who researched the programmes. It was the 1980s so we employed a member of Militant (at least I think he used to get the newspaper) but also a member of a Roman Catholic sect, a retired rent boy and someone who was later splashed across the front page of The Observer as an SIS agent. We gave a break to a minicab driver who nonetheless carried on sending us abusive faxes for years. There was a troublesome former Private Eye man whose stories led me to discover that Peter Cook was a serious and professional proprietor (Cook's otherwise incessant comedy shtick vanished when he discussed the magazine's personnel problems). There was no ...

... conduct of those operating within a niche is at odds with the standards their client in this case, the British public sets, and by which the citizen judges its rivals, the reputation collapses.(6 )Spook reputation management is of consequence if retention/recruitment of honourable and skilled personnel is an objective.(7) In this SIS appears to have fallen at the first hurdle, committing the niche employer's cardinal PR error of allowing leadership admission/justification for the latest wrongdoing (torture/rendition), to tarnish the reputation of all, not the few. Wording that could have enabled spinners to project beyond the crimes could have been insertion of phrases such as 'fierce ...

... Paul's whereabouts in the hours before the crash remain unknown and there is no final explanation for the money found on his body (P199 et seq). Notes Online (PDF format) at <http://tinyurl.com/2wly33> Full text reproduced at <http://tinyurl.com/6adz3> Despite the general rubbishing of former SIS officer Richard Tomlinson and his allegations about an SIS proposal to assassinate Milosevich, the SIS officer he named did indeed recall that he had proposed the assassination of an unnamed Balkan politician and that the document recording this proposal had been destroyed. Not that you'd know this from reading the media coverage. <http://tinyurl.com/2nbls9 ...